In the Tony-nominated play “Other Desert Cities,” the character of Polly Wyeth is the drama’s linchpin, a fierce, polarizing lion of a woman who holds together her affluent but deeply troubled Palm Desert family.

Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated play makes its San Diego premiere this week at the Old Globe Theatre, and the meaty, multilayered role of Polly is in the capable hands of Kandis Chappell. The longtime Globe associate artist has appeared in more than 30 plays at the Globe since her 1975 debut — more than any other actress — and she is excited to return to her hometown stage this spring to co-star in the play with two fellow associate artists and longtime friends, Robert Foxworth and Robin Pearson Rose.

“Other Desert Cities” is set during the Christmas season of 2004. Retired right-wing political bigwig Lyman Wyeth (Foxworth), an actor-turned-ambassador for the Reagan administration, and his wife, retired screenwriter Polly, are hosting family for the holidays. Guests include Polly’s ultraliberal sister, Silda (Pearson Rose), their son Trip (Andy Bean) and their adult daughter Brooke (Dana Green), who announces that she’s planning to publish a memoir that will dredge up a tragic and dark secret from their family’s past — the suicide of her brother Henry, who had been involved decades before in a radical underground group.

Foxworth, an Encinitas resident who played the same role in “Other Desert Cities” at Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum last fall, has worked twice before at the Globe with Chappell, first in a production of Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” in 1996 and then in 2003’s “Julius Caesar.”

“She’s a thorough, professional, solidly responsible actor who’s a pleasure to work with,” Foxworth said. “She brings a great deal of imagination and creativity to the table as well.”

Hometown girl

Chappell moved last year to the Bay Area city of Alameda, but San Diego will always be her home. Born in Milwaukee, she moved with her family to Little Italy in 1953 when she was 6 years old. At Kearny High School, she gave up orchestra classes for drama, and at 17 she volunteered as a “prop girl” for the Old Globe, which was a low-budget community theater in the mid-1960s.

She first worked with Craig Noel, the Globe’s founding artistic director, in 1972, doing props for a play that starred actor Don Sparks (her co-star in this past winter’s “Pygmalion”). In 1975, she made her Globe stage debut in the one-act “After Magritte.” And she was working there when an arson fire destroyed the Globe on the morning of March 8, 1978. Chappell and her fellow castmates went on with the show (in the adjacent, undamaged Cassius Carter theater) that evening amid the smoking ruins.

“Craig called all of us together and said, ‘You will perform tonight, because people have to know we’re still here,’ ” Chappell recalled. “We were all so worried that Craig would die from a broken heart.”

Over the years, Chappell’s theater career has taken her all over the country. She did summer stock in Minnesota, had a lean year in Seattle, worked heavily at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and spent several years in New York and Los Angeles.

She created the lead role in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories” in 1996 and has played it four times. She’s also starred several times as Eleanor of Aquitaine in “The Lion in Winter.” She’s accomplished in the works of George Bernard Shaw, and she said she’ll “go anywhere” to do a play by Shakespeare or Alan Ayckbourn (her all-time favorite role was the daydreaming housewife Susan in Ayckbourn’s “Woman in Mind”).

She hasn’t hurt for stage work for decades, but she never broke through into films or television.

“It never really happened for me there. If someone called me, I’d go in a second, but what would kill my soul would be to live in L.A. and spend all my time going to auditions,” she said. “I’m lucky because my career has been spent with people calling me and offering me work. If I’m going to be poor and struggling, I’d rather be doing Shaw and Shakespeare than two lines on TV.”

Noel, who died in 2010 at the age of 94, remains her all-time favorite director.

“He became my spiritual father, he was my mentor, and he did a lot to shape my life and career,” she said. “Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur because everything about my aesthetic and my approach to work I learned from Craig Noel.”

Chappell said she’s talked about retiring, but as long as good roles are still being offered, she won’t. She would like to start a play-reading group so she can perform some of the roles she’s now too old to play, like Juliet from “Romeo and Juliet,” Rosalind in “As You Like It” and Lizzie in “The Rainmaker.”

Playing Polly

Chappell said that she’s still exploring the character of Polly in “Other Desert Cities,” which is being directed by Richard Seer, who runs the Globe’s MFA theater program at the University of San Diego. The character is iron-willed, but Chappell said she’s finding Polly’s softer side.

“I told Rick (Seer) I don’t want her to be brittle or domineering. She’s so tough in her way, but I don’t want her to be hard. We’re walking a very fine line here.”

She describes her technique for creating a character as “pointillist.”

“I work technically, very much from the outside in. I have to put every dot in place with a character and then the audience sees the finished picture,” she said. “To get there I ask a lot of questions and do what I call arm wrestling. I’m not sure every director likes it, but I tell them that if I have to do this eight times a week, it won’t make sense if I’m faking it. It has to be right for me.”

Returning to “Other Desert Cities” for the second time, Foxworth said he understands the complex relationship between Polly and Lyman, who are living with long-buried secrets and lies that have poisoned their marriage as well as their relationship with their surviving children.

“Lyman’s a guy with a smart, smart wife who has gone with the flow,” he said. “She is the motivator for this family and has done the difficult job of moving them into the positions of power and respectability, but she’s done it at a great, great cost.”